Tossing this one out for personal takes: what do you mean when you say you understand something?

Ken had sent me a reference and after diving into a couple of articles at a professor's website I concluded that I was comfortable with the way the professor explicated things.

Which made me wonder - are explanation types a personal preference? Which segued somewhat into explanations and understanding.

For me to say I understand something I mean that I can form a picture of it, can explicate the interworkings of the elements, make predictions given the state of the elements, and explain the conceptual construct to someone else. This makes me sympathetic to explanations that support making sense of things this way.

This conceptual structurizing is not overly well suited to people modelling (barring a few models like NLP and such).

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2000

Answers

Well, I would think "understanding" is reached when my mind has resolved any perceived conflicting patterns pertaining to my perception of the stnace presented by the other party. However, my perception of the stance may not be accurately aligned with the intended pattern, and there may be conflicting patterns I am consciously unaware of, or even subconciously unaware of, giving me the feeling of understanding though I may be feeling from a position of ignorance which cannot be overcome....

Now, my question - If "I" have resolved the recognized conflicting patterns, and my conscious and subconscious are satisfied with my "understanding", why would I think about it anymore? Is this the unconscious at work? Is the unconscious the "fire" that initiates "thinking"?

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000

"What do you mean when you say you understand something?"

For me it goes to the level of "knowing" something is so, either because I've lived through enough physical life experiences--and learned the lessons they taught--enough to identify with what is being communicated...

...Or I feel it as being "in balance" within the emotions, because on an intuitive or gut-level it "feels right."

...Or I experience body "truth tingles..." a kinesthetic experience.

...Or I "see" it playing out in the mind's eye. A kind of psychic knowing.

...Or I've connected and collected enough synchronistic puzzle pieces that slot into life's mosaic, and it becomes just another that "fits" with what I already know about "what works..." at least for me.

(I recognize Tom, that my way of "knowing/understanding" may make you uncomfortable. Sorry).

;-D

Diane

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000

Diane - peace!

Your competence in the world needs no defending from me. I wouldn't be asking if I didn't think that there was something to learn from you.

I have personal references for your latter three examples, and also I think for your second. I go fuzzy on your first example (can imagine too many things which might be represented by what your saying to have any confidence that I know what you said....)

Your one about "body tingles" reminded me of something that happened in one of the NLP seminars I attended. John Grinder was presenting a seminar on modelling, a last minute substitute for Robert Dilts whose father had died just before the seminar, and John was demonstrating examples of when we know something but don't know specifically what we know. He was working through some examples of pluralizing words, showing how native English speakers will know whether to apply an "ssss" sound or a "zzzz" sound to a given word, and how it this knowing must be rule based because he could get uniform agreement on pluralization of words that he just made up (so it wasn't a matter of merely memorizing each example). Anyway - he offered to install a signal on each of us that would activate when we knew something, but that hadn't yet "popped" in consciousness. I chose to have the signal placed on my left palm.

Your statement "...Or I experience body "truth tingles..." a kinesthetic experience." is a nice description of exactly what it feels like when some aspect of me explicitly knows something, but the something is not yet available to make an image/verbal description/sensation about.

Which kind of teases the question open into "knowing" and "understanding". I know how to ride a bike. I know how to pluralize words in English (conjugate them too!) - but I wouldn't be able to explain it.

So - is understanding different than knowing?

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000